The present invention relates to an aerator for providing aeration to a wine, and, more particularly, to a wine aerator that can be located atop of an individual wine glass to enable a user to pour wine through the wine aerator into the glass and be aerated as the wine enters the glass.
Generally it is well known that the aeration of red wines improves the flavor and aroma. One traditional means of aeration of wine was to allow the wine to “breathe” such that the wine is allowed to stand for a period of time in contact with air to aerate. As such, the wine typically would be poured into a container having a large mouth in order to contact a large wine surface with the air for a period of time.
A downside, however, of letting wine breath or passively contact the air is that such type of aeration takes time. The aeration of wine simply standing in a wine glass or other container can take up to an hour or more for the aeration process to reach the desired level of aeration of the wine. Therefore, at certain occasions, such as dining at a restaurant, it is not always possible to let the wine sit, after uncorking, for a sufficient period of time to fully carry out the aeration process.
There are currently known, certain devices that carry out the aeration process rapidly such that the need to allow the wine to stand for a period of time is eliminated. Such devices allow the aeration process to take place immediately as the wine is poured from the wine bottle into a receiver, such as a wine glass or other wine receptacle.
Some of such current aeration devices are inserted into the opening in the wine bottle upon uncorking the bottle and the wine is aerated as it is poured out of the bottle. One difficulty, however, of such wine aerators is that the aerator interfits into a standard wine bottle and, while that may be acceptable in many circumstances, there are times that a non-standard bottle is used or the wine has already been poured into some vessel, such as a decanter, and therefore the wine aerator cannot be interfitted in a fluid tight manner into the non-standard wine containers.
Other aerators require the aeration of a total bottle of wine at a time and cannot be used on a glass by glass basis. Such “bottle” aerators are, again, suitable where the intention is to consume the entire bottle of wine at a particular sitting, however, the “bottle” type aerators are not convenient where the user only wants to aerate one glass of wine for immediate consumption and thereafter re-cork the bottle for subsequent use at a later time.
Other examples of aerators are complex and are therefore expensive, or may have moving components that require a seal between moving parts which are susceptible to wear and ultimately, eventual leaking between the moving parts. Of the latter type, the wine aerator shown and described in U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2010/0025867 of Benton et al has a moving pipe, and therefore a seal is necessary along the moving pipe, thereby adding to the cost of manufacture and assembly. With a seal between two moving components, there is also the potential for wear of the seal with the consequent leakage of wine from the aerator.
It would therefore be advantageous to have a wine aerator that overcomes the inherent difficulties and drawbacks associated with the aforementioned wine aerators and which is relatively easy to construct and therefore is inexpensive and yet provides the needed aeration to the wine on a glass by glass basis.